Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday February 05, 2012 @05:35PM
from the do-you-want-the-mustache-on-or-off? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "'Some people remember Sealab as being a classified program, but it was trying not to be,' says Ben Hellwarth, author of the new book Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor, which aims to 'bring some long overdue attention to the marine version of the space program.' In the 1960s, the media largely ignored the efforts of America's aquanauts, who revolutionized deep-sea diving and paved the way for the underwater construction work being done today on offshore oil platforms. It didn't help that the public didn't understand the challenges of saturation diving; in a comical exchange a telephone operator initially refuses to connect a call between President Johnson and Aquanaut Scott Carpenter, (who sounded like a cartoon character, thanks to the helium atmosphere in his pressurized living quarters). But in spite of being remembered as a failure, the final incarnation of Sealab did provide cover for a very successful Cold War spy program."

There was the idea in the 1960s that the ocean was as important a frontier as space. There was talk of undersea cities. Today, zilch. There are pretty renderings of underwater hotels on the web, but none of them actually got built. The one "underwater hotel" in the world is a recycled two room research habitat.

Drilling wells in the ocean floor is a big business, but that's about as far as it's gone.

You've got to be joking. It wouldn't matter even if there were oceans of high grade crude oil on the moon. Look at the Saturn V- the entire thing is one big fuel canister, with an engine on the bottom, and a little crew capsule on top. They burned that entire canister's worth of fuel just to get that tiny little Apollo module to the Moon and back. Moving a mining operation into space, and then moving fuel out of a gravity well- even a shallow one like the Moon- is going to burn far more than you could ever transport; it's a losing proposition. To move fuel economically you need something like an oil tanker or a train- a vehicle that moves vast quantities of fuel, while burning only a little bit of fuel itself. And to do that, you'd need something like a highly efficient fusion engine, or some kind of fantastic Star Trek technology. And if you had that technology, why would you need to get fuel from space?

The same goes for pretty much any resource except maybe gold. It takes a huge amount of resources to go to space and back. The only way it's profitable is if the resources you bring back are more expensive than the resources you expend building and launching the rocket. Until that changes- until there's some radical change in launch technology that makes space travel cheaper — not by a factor of two or three, but orders of magnitude cheaper — the idea of resource extraction in space isn't even science fiction, it's fantasy.

Do you remember how efficiently crude oil was harvested and refined 100 years ago? I wouldn't be surprised if the early wells achieved 10% extraction of the available raw material.

All we need to get lunar petroleum back to Earth is a space elevator pipeline, (relatively) easy to build on the moon, and if you pump it fast enough, it will get slung out the other end with more energy than you are pumping into it. Then we just have to catch it as it free falls toward Earth and give it a safe re-entry, again, Space Elevators seem like the way to go, and you can run some pretty nice generating turbines capturing the kinetic energy of the falling petroleum.

Anyone who believes the above is serious needs to check their humor sensors... on the other hand, using space elevators to lower raw materials from orbit just might be a good way to power mass up to orbit...

Do you remember how efficiently crude oil was harvested and refined 100 years ago? I wouldn't be surprised if the early wells achieved 10% extraction of the available raw material.

All we need to get lunar petroleum back to Earth is a space elevator pipeline, (relatively) easy to build on the moon, and if you pump it fast enough, it will get slung out the other end with more energy than you are pumping into it. Then we just have to catch it as it free falls toward Earth and give it a safe re-entry, again,

Yeah, 50 years ago "skyscrapers OMG 100 stories tall!!!" were impressive, it's time to take the game to the next level.

Absolutely. The NIAC Final report (Phase II) report talks about some remarkable possibilities and not as expensive as I expected,about 4 billion in 2003 dollars from memory. Time for us to colonise the solar system, I can't see the human race getting any smaller.

or a space elevator of some kind. I believe designs for that have been in the works for years and is only limited by carbon nanotube length. We are getting better and better at making longer tubes but the lengths we need for the elevator is a long way off. Granted this is from memory of a article i read in a NG magazine in high school but the idea is the trip will take a few days(which i think would be much lower if not transporting living things) and will end on a landing platform in low earth orbit. At th

Your point would be wonderfully made, if not for the fact that Earth is at the bottom of the gravity well and the Moon is near the top. If there was crude oil on the moon (or any other useful energy-bearing ore), all that would be needed would be to get it to free-return trajectory, which is a whole lot less than raising it to LEO from Earth.

You've got to be joking. A +5 Insightful for that? The Moon has no meaningful atmosphere. That means all those friction problems with magnetic launch systems no longer apply. You use a linear motor to get you up to whatever speed you need to be going, and then just coast the rest of the way. At our current utility costs, you would be looking at a couple $/kg to put something into Lunar transfer orbit, and maybe a few dozen $/kg for enough fuel for a LEO insertion burn, although that could be cut down s

I've done calculations to show that picking up giant diamonds from the surface of Mars with a very optimistically priced robot wouldn't be profitable. The only possible resource that could be profitable to bring back from space would be He3 from the moon, for use in fusion power.

Aside from DeBeers control of the market, the diamonds that are in high demand are based off the four "C"s. Cut, Color, Clarity, and Carat. The diamonds that fall in the worst ranking of all categories are relegated to the industrial market (cutting, drilling, etc).

How about something with higher value for the mass, like knowledge? To throw out a crazy example, here's my scenario of a university on Mars [nasaspaceflight.com].

To summarize, you already start with a manned settlement that primarily science-focused. In other words, there's already someone burning money on closely related areas. The university idea is a value-add on top of that big expenditure.

Replace some of the lower skilled jobs with students who effectively learn the equivalent of a master's degree in a limited select

It wouldn't matter even if there were oceans of high grade crude oil on the moon. Look at the Saturn V- the entire thing is one big fuel canister

You are perfectly correct that petroleum from space will never make sense with Saturn V technology.

However, that huge canister of fuel was for lifting stuff out of Earth gravity. If you assume we have the infrastructure for petroleum collection in space, you should agree that it's a lot easier to convince a canister of petroleum to fall down to Earth than to lift

We already have the tech to build space elevators or pipelines that would work on Mars (as well as mag-launchers). There's also sufficient raw materials to launch to space that could then become a container. If it's one-way (Mars to Earth only), then it's feasibility is much closer to reality.

but of all places to find pockets of oil and natural gas in space, Mars is our closest workable candidate.

I was under the impression that fossil fuels were a result of organic (i.e. formerly living) material getting compressed for a few million years. There is no evidence that the required quantities of life ever existed on Mars and nor (I believe) any evidence of the plate tectonics needed to compress it when it was dead.

Arguably, deep-ish ocean has most of the same things going against it that space does, but with the additional(advantage or disadvantage depends on your opinion) that there is a much 'smoother' gradient between terrestrial work and deep-ocean work than there is between land and space.

With a mixture of robots and things on strings, you can exploit much of the economically interesting stuff below the water surface without any long term human habitation. Where that isn't possible(certain construction projects related to drilling, some salvage work, having a fleet of nuclear submarines ready to get their second-strike on with extreme prejudice...) you do, indeed, find people. Generally very expensive ones; but available if you are suitably motivated.

The cost of entry starts at nearly zero, pick up a fishing line at your nearest sporting goods shop, and just keeps going up, more or less smoothly(but very, very fast at the high end) for how deep you want to go and how long you want to go there. That's the kicker: For any cool undersea scheme, you can probably cook up a scheme with 90% of the benefits at much lower cost just by not going as deep or by not staying there as long. It doesn't help that many of the technologies you would need to live successfully underwater could be applied more easily and more pleasantly to existing untapped options.

Want to live on seafood and algae, in a hamster-habitube, in a hostile environment where you can't drink the water? No problem, we have loads of coastal desert where you can desalinate to your heart's content, and won't even have to breath trimix all the time!

One REALLY big difference between undersea and space is air pressure. If you want people to be living near 1atm of pressure then in space you have to deal with at most 1atm of pressure on your hull. Underwater you're dealing with more than 1atm of pressure before you reach depths on par with a big swimming pool. That means you need a lot less structural strength in your spacecraft.

All the messing around with gas mixtures undersea is about trying to work at higher pressures to cut down on that disadvantage, but it gets really messy - people are designed to live at 1atm on 20% O2. In space that is fairly easy to provide, and deep underwater it is almost impossible.

Now, in space you have lots of other issues to deal with I'll grant you, and the cost of moving around is pretty high too (well, maneuver in space is cheaper per mile than underwater, except that stuff is thousands of miles apart so you do a LOT more of it and once you're close to a gravity well you build up kinetic/potential energy and changing your energy state is much harder). Underwater you can just use buoyancy to do half the work.

That's not really true, only some of these thing is open in the bottom, others have airlooks.

and even if it's open in the bottom there will be a pressure difference. If there is 4 meters from the open bottom to the top there will be a 4 meters of water of pressure difference at the top and the surrounding water. (5.7 psi overpressure on the inside at the top, or about 0.4 atm of pressure difference).

(The air pressure inside will be the same as the water pressure at the opening in the floor. On the outside 4

That's not really true, only some of these thing is open in the bottom, others have airlooks.

BTW, you have that exactly backwards. If you have an opening at the bottom of a submersible, you eliminate ANY issue with water pressure on the structure. (Because the water coming in the opening will pressurize the air to the same pressure -- the hull then has no pressure differential between inside and outside.) Of course, the oxygen in the air you breathe becomes toxic, and the nitrogen does bad things to you. (woo hoo! Narcosis!)

If you want to maintain 1atm inside, your structure now has to handle the differential between inside and outside, and be rigid enough to not compress. At 30 feet depth, you need to handle a 14psi differential (which is greater than the pressure differential you get from an atomic blast! That's why even at 30 ft, you need fairly thick steel to handle the pressure.

You missed his point about the opening. It equalizes the internal air pressure to the water pressure at the bottom of the structure. There is still a relatively small pressure differential due to the varying water pressure along the height of the structure. The ceiling would have to tolerate expansive forces. Since the water pressure is linear with the depth though, the effect would be a property of the structure itself, not dependent on the depth at which the structure was placed.

At 30 feet depth, you need to handle a 14psi differentialThis is your own statement, and (without checking your actual #) it's true, because water is so heavy (massive). But change your depth 30 ft in the atmosphere and there is relatively little pressure difference. You can go up and down in an elevator all day and you won't explode. This is because air is so light (lacking mass).

The GP's point - I think - is that if you have a 30 foot tall underwater structure filled with pressurized gas, the pressure created by the water will be (by your number) 14psi greater at the bottom part than at the top part. But because the gas pressure differential is much less variant by depth the gas pressure at the top is the same as at the bottom. So you actually have to worry about blowing out the top of your open-on-the-bottom underwater highrise. There goes the whole 0 psi differential idea, but in the opposite direction one might expect. Maybe an easier problem to deal with (if you keep your structure squat), but still something to make sure the engineers account for.

If, and only if, you are content to breathe either some sort of liquid(maybe they've finally gotten those fluorocarbons worked out?) or some gas mix at whatever the pressure imposed by your depth is. Unfortunately, it appears that virtually all potential atmospheres are some flavor of toxic, narcotic, or both at any more than modest pressure.

Also, "Dysbaric Osteonecrosis" is about as fun as it sounds, possibly less so.

There is no pressure gradient in space either, as long as you're willing to put your crew in an evacuated living area. If you want your crew to be living in 1atm of pressure, then you have a HUGE pressure issue underwater.

Most of the solutions are to have people breathe something different - like various mixtures with much lower concentrations of O2 and N2 so that at huge pressures people can sorta breathe them. However, so far all these mixtures have problems with them. In space they actually do the opp

The problem with Apollo 1 was that they simulated 3psi of pure oxygen overpressure in space by using 18psi of pure oxygen in the capsule while it was at sea-level. At 18psi of pure oxygen almost guaranteed an uncontrolled, exothermic oxidation reaction (i.e. fire). If the engineers involved had spent more time with the engineers working on Sealab, they wouldn't have made such an elementary mistake.

I think that undersea conditions are actually more challenging than Space, at least LEO Space. You've got a terrible corrosion problem underwater, typically saturation level humidity, and the pressure differential to a "shirtsleeve" environment is higher as soon as you get below 60' (at 30' depth, you can saturation dive indefinitely with no special gasses and no decompression needed...), and then there's the mixed gas / decompression thing if you want to run your environment at a higher pressure to make a larger hull practical.

A blowout in the space-station can be plugged with duct tape (from the inside)... a blowout in an undersea habitat at 100' depth is considerably harder to deal with.

It is a shorter trip to "the undersea world," but the challenges pile up very quickly as you go down.

The one (partially) compensatory factor is that getting mass roughly where you want it in the ocean is dirt cheap and relatively simple compared to getting it out of a gravity well. So, if you are prepared to massively overbuild, you can at least get your monstrosity delivered...

Unfortunately, even if you are willing to massively overbuild, that doesn't solve the "But why?" problem: Living in a structure designed largely for its ability to survive massive pressure for any length of time would be a fairly

F) in the 1960s, I'm sure they were also thinking natural Nuclear bomb shelter too.

Yeah, very expensive just for those things, and important to our cash driven society is that you can't really generate anything of value more efficiently by living underwater to do it. Still, I think a 6000 square foot structure, with decent 8'+ ceilings, ample natural light in every room (bigger windows than terrestrial structures due to less light at depth), moon pool entry at about 25' depth (internal pressure ~+12.5psi), hella powerful A/C system to keep the humidity at bay, ROV spearfishing system, and some kind of self-sufficient ocean generated energy system would make a decent working platform for 3-4 people to study, well, ocean generated energy systems for one thing. I could also see studying underwater building materials (3d printing with underwater concrete?) and any number of other things related to sustainable ocean dwelling.

Thing is, it looks like a playtime project, so nobody will fund it, even if it would generate useful spinoff tech, and waste less resources than any number of less visible pork projects.

Oh, and a random thought: how much water (ice) would it take to effectively shield a Earth-Mars shuttle from radiation? And, could we collect asteroids/comets to put together an ice-ball big enough to put a nice transit lounge habitat (not too dissimilar from the undersea habitat mentioned above, except that the fish will be frozen) into an Earth-Mars figure 8 orbit? Think solar-powered ion engines instead of chemical reactions...

I saw a presentation on NASA's current thoughts on shielding, but didn't take notes so I can't quote specifics. The shielding choices they listed were water, polyethylene, and liquid hydrogen. The LH2 was the most effective and thinnest shield. A water shield for an Earth-Mars trip was something like 1-3 meters thick and not thought to be practical for launch from Earth. Someone did suggest captured "comet cores" as the best source of a water shield.

10 feet thick, say we want 50,000 cubic feet of shielded volume, that's a cube about 37' per side, so 47' external dimension, round up and call it 6 plates 50x50x10, 150,000 cubic feet of shield - weighing 4.25 million kg - that would be 36 Saturn V launches to get the water up to LEO... yeah, it'll be more fun to track down water bearing asteroids, even though launch costs of $40B aren't really that high, for the cost of the Iraq war [infoplease.com] we could have launched 20 of these water shields.

A blowout in the space-station can be plugged with duct tape (from the inside)... a blowout in an undersea habitat at 100' depth is considerably harder to deal with.

When the submarine floods at near the beginning of the movie (obviously more than 100' down, but still)...I have never been so scared in my entire movie-going life. There's something very, very terrifying about drowning in enclosed spaces...

And how about when the two main characters are deciding who gets the dry suit as their submersible fills up with water? God damn....

I don't think a lot of people are clamoring to live on the ocean floor. On a continental shelf would be bad enough. It's not an easy life, expensive and pretty risky. There are remotely operated vehicles and other machines to do the drilling for oil and related work.

Going through the list thereJules Undersea Lodge: a converted two bedroom research facility. Located in a lake 21 feet down. Dive entry.Utter Inn: a box just below the surface with surface entry not much different from the lower sections of a boat except there is water between the upper and lower sections. Only one room.Hydropolis: looks like it was intended to be a proper hotel though only barely underwater and surface entry but the article you linked claims it as "under construction" but wikipedia links to another article that claims it is "nothing more than a pile of blueprints". Looks like it got nixed in the wake of the credit crunch.Poseidon Undersea Resorts: this does actually sound like an undersea hotel but from their website it is not at all clear whether it was ever finished or not. Trying to get a "booking request form" out of their website gives the message "Thank you for your interest in Poseidon Resorts. We welcome you to contact us after September 15, 2009.". This suggests the website hasn't been updated in years.Istanbul: I can't find any evidence of this underwater hotel actually exiting either.

I did a list some time ago, just to inventory how many actual underwater destinations there are and came away with about a dozen. There's more than you're aware of, and they are already built. The Ithaa is an all glass panoramic undersea restaurant (1atm, in just 15 feet of water) the Huvafen Fushi undersea spa is another 1atm facility, concrete hull, big picture windows, perhaps 20 feet underwater. The Red Sea Star is a more ambitious undersea restaurant, 30 feet deep, concrete hull, wraparound segmented w

The same could be said for space, there are a load of satellites and a single manned space station for research but there are no space cities or space hotels, there have only been 6 manned landings on the moon and afaict no human has left LEO since.

The fact is both space and deep ocean are hostile environments. Space has the additional issue of being extremely expensive to get to and from.

The main reason all of those "big ideas" suddenly went away in the 70's was because President Johnson's "Great Society" programs exploded in cost and we could no longer afford to spend money on research like we previously had. In the intervening decades the expense of social programs has multiplied many times to the point we can't afford any kind of space program even unless we borrow money to pay for it. The future is indeed grim. Just imagine what we could have accomplished by now if we hadn't decided to go the socialism route. We've spent at least $16 TRILLION dollars on social programs and the percentage of people in poverty has barely changed. Imagine what we could have done in space, the ocean, research, etc. with that kind of money.

I was an air cadet in my younger days so I had the opportunity to travel to various air bases around Canada. I've heard various stories about an intact Arrow; it was ditched in Cold Lake, AB, it's in a warehouse somewhere in Quebec, it was flown over the border and has been hidden by the Americans, etc.

Probably the best story was from an older gentleman who claims to have been involved in the scrapping operation. He said every plane was cut up but not every piece was accounted for. The Canadian Aviation and

I'm not sure that the fact that the "aquanauts" had funny-sounding voices when they were in their undersea, "synthetic-gas environment" is a sufficient explanation for the public and the media ignoring the Sealab programs.

If the media and a cereal company could turn Kim Kardashian's cross-dressing step-dad [brucejenner.com] into a symbol of American manhood, then Scott Carpenter's helium-induced impression of Felix the Cat could not really have been that big of a public relations problem.

Divers sometimes use helium to replace some of the nitrogen. If you're at pressure, then the amount of nitrogen that goes into your blood stream can cause nitrogen narcosis. If you lower the partial pressure of N2 (by using He) then this is less likely.

Helium also diffuses quicker than nitrogen. But this can mean that decompression is a bit more difficult.

Out of curiosity: why helium rather than argon? Argon's dead cheap, dead common, and doesn't have anywhere nearly the diffusion-through-containment-systems problems helium has. Is there some drawback to it?

Mainstream magazines certainly covered it. That's how I knew about it as a kid. Hit Google Books with 'sealab popular [google.com]' and select Full Version, for what ran in PopSci at the time.

It wasn't anywhere near as big a deal as the Moon program, but it got very good coverage for a single science program. Off the top of my head I can't think of another back then that got as much other than the Moon race.

I think it's hyperbole to say 'largely ignored'. There was a pretty good proportionate recognition. A little better than it deserved, arguably.

The high-pressure, high-humidity atmosphere of the lab caused the fungi to spread like wildfire, to the point where it would spread to the entire body, and even cause a secondary bacterial infection with alarming ease.

Alan Krasberg, one of the researchers connected
with Sealab, was the son of one of my mother's best friends, Tammy Krasberg.
Apparently one afternoon Alan was testing some rebreathing equipment in the family pool.
Tammy, who was reading a magazine pool-side, realized she hadn't seen any activity from him for awhile,
so she put down her magazine, dove in, hauled him to the surface and, at least according to the story
my mother told, gave him CPR. He revived and his mother went back to her magazine.

I'm tempted to believe this since Tammy was one of the most unflappable people I have ever met.